MIYAXX Releases New Single "GO EASY" Ahead of Album
Lea Thomas and John Thayer will celebrate the album with a release show at The Avalon Lounge in Catskill, NY.
Catskill, NY-based duo Miyaxx has released a new single, 'Go Easy,' ahead of their upcoming album Hold Your Ego Out Like A Sun, out September 16th. Lea Thomas and John Thayer will celebrate the album with a release show at The Avalon Lounge in Catskill, NY on September 17th.
Miyaxx is composed of two musicians: Lea Thomas, a guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose 2024 album Cosmos Forever took an expansive turn towards saturation and slowness, and John Thayer, a percussionist, audio engineer, and record producer with a 4th-world slant and an ability to fold digital manipulations into recordings of performances. Partnered in life and in music, the two are the sole musical contributors to Hold Your Ego Out Like a Sun, described as a wonderful fusing, 'neither nor, both and,' resulting in what the release calls nighttime fuzz folk that is a product of where their distinct approaches meet.
Having just released the track 'Blue Cloud White Sky' along with a video, Miyaxx has now released the track 'Go Easy.' Lea explains: 'This song speaks to the way life's highs and lows can mirror the cycles of the seasons. I had found myself in a challenging time, in an 'inner-winter' of sorts, and was finding hope in remembering the ease of a warm summer day, trusting that in a world where change is constant, the wheel of the year will inevitably bring me back to brighter days again.
The video also plays with this seasonal sentiment. We (myself and my friend Hannah Rosa Lewis-Lopes who directed the video) filmed the whole video in one location at two very different times of the year. The first shoot took place on a hot summer day, and the second shoot was in the dead of winter, fresh after a snow storm.'
The album phases between possible worlds, crossfading between moments that feel ostensibly like Thomas singing songs in a room and swirling constructions like 'The Shape You Make Returning' that feel like a looming binary tidal wave, a bitcrushed, Loveless wall of noise, with vocals at the center of the mix wordless and tugging, likened in the release to something Elizabeth Fraser or Liz Harris would sing. According to the release, the album is never purely electronic wizardry and never pure acoustic duo — amid automation and autotune, there is something human, and between the hits of a ride cymbal or the ringing out of a chord there is the crinkle of Thayer's DAW maneuvers, a natural/digital agitation that brings Mount Eerie to mind. The release describes lullaby melodies that dance between steel string harmonics, modular clicks and clacks like summer bugs and frogs, and the bracing cymbal explosions of a drumset entering suddenly. The album's opener is described as sounding at first like the most sublime moments in the Red House Painters catalog before cascading over a waterfall of distortion. The track 'Go Easy' features a toe-tapping bassline described as not out of place on a Broadcast or Massive Attack song, with occasional field recordings delicately peppered in, towering, overdriven flames that approach and consume the sonic space, the geologic rumbling of synthesized bass, and the presence of Lea Thomas' voice, ebbing and flowing.
Photo Credit: Viktorsha Uliyanova
Photo Credit: Viktorsha Uliyanova
